La référence temporelle au futur dans les bulletins météo en France et au Québec:regard variationniste sur l’oral préparé

The distribution of variants used to express future temporal reference has been the object of many studies, focused on conversational speech or on written data. This article sheds new light on the issue by studying future markers in a communicative setting which consists of prepared speech (the televised weather forecast) from a diatopic perspective (comparison of French and Québécois corpora). The distributional analysis points to a distribution of variants specific to this discursive setting. Furthermore, the Goldvarb X multivariate analysis reveals diatopic variation and the influence of some linguistic factors, most notably the type of verb, as well as the effect of constraints specific to the two speech communities under study.

Les Français, les Québécois et la langue de l'autre:relations entre langue, société et culture

Quels sont les rapports entre une culture et une langue? Les Francophones de France et du Québec partagent-ils la même culture? On peut répondre à ces questions en étudiant les discours sur l'autre. L'analyse des discours publics sur la langue de l'autre permet de démontrer des divergences entre les deux groupes. Elles comprennent la valeur relative accordée à chaque variété, l'importance qu'y prend la formalité et la façon qu'on y a de conduire la conversation. Ces différences sont solidaires des stéréotypes sur l'arrogance des uns et la simplicité des autres.

Les normes sociolinguistiques et leur changement:La légitimation en cours du français québécois dans la littérature gallicane

Different disciplinary fields in the humanities have started to formulate the question of the representations by one community of the linguistic practices of some other communities with which a common language is nonetheless shared. This question is considered through the way in which Quebec French is represented in two recent detective novels from France French authors. Two rhetorical strategies are evidenced. A realist strategy presents Quebec French as a differential practice and cannot escape reasserting the symbolic asymmetry between a so-called peripheral variety and the central variety from which the author is writing. A moderation strategy brings together practices from different groups without identifying them as such. The study further allows us to document the apparent reduction in the linguistic insecurity of the Quebec French community, through the reception of the first strategy in particular.

Forensic linguistics : the application of language description in legal contexts

In this article I first divide Forensic Linguistics into three sub-disciplines: the language of written legal texts, the spoken language of legal proceedings, and the linguist as expert witness and then go on to give a small number of examples of the research undertaken in these three areas. For the language of written legal texts, I present work on the (in) comprehensibility of police cautions and of judges instructions to juries. For the spoken language of legal proceedings, I report work on the problems of interpreted interaction, of vulnerable witnesses and the need for more detailed research comparing the interactive rules in adversarial and investigative systems. Finally, to illustrate the role of the linguist as expert witness I report a trademark case, five different authorship attribution cases, three very different plagiarism cases and I end reporting briefly the contribution of linguists to language assessment techniques used in the linguistic classification of asylum seekers. © Langage et société no 132 - juin 2010.